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Public
School
Elementary
I began my formal education in an elementary school in Gladewater,
Texas. I remember skipping past the oil derricks on my way to class.
I moved to Texarkana briefly and began to read about Dick, Jane
and Spot at Weir Elementary. It was an extremely old school and
had two entrances, one for girls and one for boys. I moved again
in the first grade because my father had gone to work as a sign
painter at Weaver's Shipyard in Orange, Texas. First I went to a
two room school, Bancroft Elementary. Then we were bused into the
large Anderson Elementary. Because of the war, the shipyard workers
needed housing , so new houses and elementary schools were built
on land made by pumping sand from the Sabine River onto a marsh.
So in the second and third grades, I went to Colburn Elementary
and then to Tilley Elementary, both schools named for men from Orange
who were killed in the war. I remember one excellent teacher from
that period, Miss Avant, who taught me in the fourth grade.
Junior High
I
went to Carr Junior High in Orange from the 7-9 grade. I mostly
hid in the back of the room and read library books. I made good
enough grades to get by. At the end of the ninth grade year, I finally
began to pay attention in class. I particularly liked Algebra I.
High
School
I attended Stark High School, and I had several remarkably good
teachers, considering how little teachers were paid then. Probably
the best of them all was Henry Lee Hord, who taught me Civics. He
had a passion for his subject and an odd way of teaching. He sometimes
balanced a ruler in his hand as he lectured. My biology and math
teacher, Annie Warren, was much less outgoing, but very sound and
successful. Even weirder than Mr. Hord was my speech teacher, Estelle
Fakes, who would be worth an entire essay. I may write it someday.
Bachelor
of Arts
September 1954-December 1956,
January 1959-August 1959.
North Texas State College
I had many really fine teachers at North Texas. J. K. G. Silvey,
my biology professor, may have been the best lecturer I have ever
heard. Madame DeShazo was exceedingly demanding as a French teacher.
Elizabeth Lomax taught me freshmen English and prepared me well
for the excellent grammar teacher, Mary Whitten, one of the authors
of the Harbrace College Handbook. E. S. Clifton taught
me history of the language, English language in America, and later
old English. He was my favorite teacher ever because he taught so
well subject matter I cared so much about. Martin Shockley was an
extraordinary individual. He made Estelle Fakes and Henry Lee Hord
seem ordinary. I will write my version of his eccentricities. Grover
Lewis who was there at that time has already published a description
of him and his class. Check it out in Splendor in the Short
Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader. I'm surprised that I have never
read anything written about Shockley by Larry McMurtry, who was
also in my survey of American Literature class. And I guess I should
mention here that I was in persuasive speaking class with Pat Boone
and lived down the hall in the freshmen dorm with Joe Don Baker.
I went off to spend two years with the US Army. I moved from Private
E1 to Specialist 4, while doing basic training with the 47th Infantry
Battalion and advanced basic with the 60th Inf. I won a two dollar
prize for being the fastest at disassembling an M1919A6 machine
gun. I moved on to become a supply clerk at Fort Polk, Louisana,
and a clerk in the 97th Machine Records Unit in San Antonio. While
there, I took three classes at San Antonio college, so I was able
to graduate from North Texas in the Summer of 1959 with a B. A.
degree in English, after only three years of college.
Master of Arts
Summers 1960-2, North Texas State University
I did all my course work for the M. A. during the summers while
I was teaching in Dickinson and Irving. I researched my thesis and
wrote it after teaching and grading papers. William Belcher, who
had taught me all my Eighteenth Century English Literature classes,
directed my thesis. I reported on the essay collection written and
published in Edinburgh by some Scots intellectuals, The Mirror.
Doctor
of Philosophy
Summers 1963-67, September-December 1966. The University
of Texas at Austin
I spent one semester on campus. Except for that, I taught full time
at Tarleton State and Southwest Texas State while I was working
on the degree. So I didn't finish my dissertation until 1972. While
at the University of Texas, I had several excellent professors.
My major professor was William B. Todd, who was absolutely mesmerizing
when he talked about the physical book and book collecting. Check
out Essays in Honor of William B. Todd by Warner Barnes.
Also on my committee was Joseph Jones, Leo Hughes, and Ambrose Gordon.
Joseph Jones introduced me to Nature Writing in his course on the
American Transcen-dentalist. Check out his Life on Waller Creek:
A Palaver About History As Pure and Applied Education . Leo
Hughes taught me the works of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell.
Check out his Drama's Patrons. It's a suprisingingly interesting
book about the boisterous audiences of eighteenth-century England.
Ambrose Gordon taught me modern poetry, particularly William Butler
Yeats. Check out Gordon's The Invisible Tent: The War Novels
of Ford Madox Ford. I also took courses from the linguist Archibald
A. Hill, who was remarkable for getting wonderfully off the subject.
He came to class every day with enthusiam for a new subject and
would discuss it whatever the subject of the course. I loved it.
Check out his Introduction to Linguistic Structures: From Sound
to Sentence in English.
In my dissertation, I reported on my research on the dramatist,
Richard Cumberland, and how his minority characters compared to
the minority characters of his predecessors and contemporaries.
I reported on his and other's treatment of the stock Jew, Irishman,
Scots, Welsh, and West Indian.
Back
to Dick Heaberlin home page.
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